Hello, Birders. After that tantalizing prediction of mine from Monday afternoon, I figure I owe it to y'all to report on what I actually heard in the overnight hours of Monday-Tuesday, May 11th-12th. In a nutshell, there was a lot up there, as predicted, with the winds having shifted to the southeast. But it was a little more complicated than that: What I hadn't anticipated--although perhaps I should have--was the effect of the bright gibbous moon, which resulted in a great deal of vocal activity by ground-based anurans and avians. At 3am, there was a terrific racket of western chorus frogs, northern leopard frogs, Spotted Sandpipers, Killdeer, American Avocets, Yellow-headed Blackbirds (!), robins (of course), Pied-billed Grebes, and others. Especially Soras. An amazing phenomenon was hearing a ground-based Sora communicating with an apparent migrant Sora high overhead; the flying (migrating?) Sora got closer and closer and finally, I assume, landed in the marsh with the other Soras. Wild. As to dickey birds, I heard them at>1/minute, and I might have heard a fair bit more, had there not been so much ambient noise. I heard several presumed Clay-colored and Brewer's Sparrows, several presumed Orange-crowned Warblers, several presumed White-crowned Sparrows, a few Yellow Warblers (or were they Blackpolls?--the flight calls are virtually identical), and a lot of Chipping Sparrows. No thrushes, grosbeaks, buntings, tanagers, anything like that--that would be too easy, eh? Ted Floyd [email protected] Lafayette, Boulder County, Colorado ------------------------------- Ted Floyd Editor, Birding ------------------------------- Please support the American Birding Association: Click on http://www.goodsearch.com/?charityid=884482 to search the internet. Every search provides support to the ABA's programs in Education, Conservation, and Publications. Please visit the website of the American Birding Association: http://www.aba.org _________________________________________________________________ Insert movie times and more without leaving Hotmail®. http://windowslive.com/Tutorial/Hotmail/QuickAdd?ocid=TXT_TAGLM_WL_HM_Tutorial_QuickAdd1_052009 --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ Join us at the 2009 Convention in Alamosa: http://cfo-link.org/convention/index.php
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